Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 22:22:11 +0100
From: Davey R
Subject: BlueShark-Video-15
Author's note: This is sheer dumb fantasy, with sex and violence and dark
elements. Not cool in real life, and not to be taken seriously. Just
something you've found on late night TV. Any movies, actors, television
shows, comic books, etc, named in this series are totally fictional.
-----------------------------------------------------
BlueShark Video 15
As you drive back home, you think more about the guy in the movie, that
Justin Benchley kid. Not just because he's so cute - though you have to
admit that's a big part of it - but because he seems very familiar in a way
you can't quite put your finger on.
When you finally arrive back at your apartment in the city, the sky turning
purple and cold, first thing you do after checking your messages and making
a pot of coffee is take out your laptop and fire it up.
A quick hunt with the usual search engines turns up a huge amount of hits
showing 'Justin Benchley' to be the name of a character in a TV show. The
auto-suggest function also comes up with 'Jared Shaden', and this is soon
confirmed as the actor who plays the character. There's a bunch of
iterations of the name of this show, Ropers Reach. That also sounds
familiar. One of those shows you might have noticed playing somewhere in
the background, without you taking any interest.
You do an image search. Yeah, you recognise him. Or... well, you sort of
do.
This is kind of weird. The first picture that comes up is a publicity shot
from the show. It shows Justin - Jared, whatever - in a short-sleeved
flannel shirt, leaning against a battered red Corvette in a gas station
that looks like it hasn't changed in about fifty years. The next image
shows him standing laughing with two guys of a similar age on a lustrous
lawn outside a majestic beige-coloured high school. Both pictures have a
golden, richly-shadowed looked to them and are composed to an ideal of
classical Americana, skewed just enough to appear hip and edgy, somewhere
between Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper.
The next picture along, with Justin in a red shirt and bow tie, holding a
mop in an archetypal roadside-style diner, only adds to the impression. You
guess right off that this is one of those teen drama shows - richly
stylised, morally earnest and peopled exclusively with boys and girls who
look straight out of the pages of a fashion magazine. The kind of show
where even the moms and dads could have been catalogue models five years
before, and the only character who veers outside of potentially fuckable is
the grizzled old high school football or basketball coach who's as wise and
worldly as a tracksuited Yoda.
It's not actually set in the 50s. You can see that from the fashions in the
high school picture. But like all those shows, it's set in a perennial
smalltown USA that is basically unchanging and where there's always another
big game on the horizon against the next town over.
The strange thing is that you immediately recognise this boy as the one you
saw featured in Release of Ramon back at Sharkey's place, and yet... on
closer inspection, it isn't actually him.
He's similar, that's for sure. Very much so. Another actor in the same
part? The Justin you saw in the movie had curlier and slightly darker hair
than this one, was a little more cherubic, in his urban way. Besides that,
though, there's not a huge amount of physical difference. That is, you
could describe either one of them and it would sound like you were
describing the other, even though it becomes more obvious the more you look
that they are not the same person, not identical like twins. It's the
clothes, you realise, helping foster that impression. In the high school
picture where he's laughing with his friends, the bright turquoise T-shirt
he wears, with the plunging V-shaped collar that shows his flat and
hairless chest, it's the same one Justin Benchley wore in that scene in
Release of Ramon, as he met Sharkey in his car. Sharkey tore it open. But
it's not just that - those are the same knee-length denim shorts, the same
battered hi-tops. And in the diner picture, the uniform he wears with its
salmon red bow tie is the same as he wore at work before that, when he
answered the phone.
'OMG dat unifom so cuuuute;-D', a post on a messageboard below informs
us. And let's be fair, it's right. It's a big tease for sex, like the pizza
delivery guy in a porn video.
A more extensive search turns up some of the inevitable photoshoots from
magazines for teenage girls. Always a guilty pleasure, these. There's
something about the beaming attempts at non-threatening sexiness that makes
these shots hotter than they could be if they were deliberately
pornographic. They profess a wholesome innocence, like this box next door
desires nothing more potent than to take you out for a cheeseburger and
milkshake, and maybe a spot of necking in the back of his dad's car. It
contrasts so deliciously with what you or I would do with him if we
could. This portrayed innocence is a coy lie, but you want to smash it
nonetheless.
The best ones are the poolside pictures. He's not quite shirtless, but
wears a very sheer vest that reveals the outlines of the torso
beneath. What a cocktease. But his bare arms are something to behold -
they're not huge or aggressively toned, but they're a perfect shape, the
roundness of the shoulders giving way to the almost symmetrical arc of his
bicep and tricep. As you look at them, you can't help but imagine how it
would feel to grasp them, how perfectly they would fit against the palms
and heels of your hands.
Best of all is this one, where he sits perched on the sun lounger. His
haunched, bare legs in surprisingly small beach shorts - not hotpant-small,
you understand, just smaller than you'd expect in this kind of
picture. God, his legs are delicious. I said you wanted to touch his arms,
but his legs look so damn good here you practically can feel
'em. Concentrate hard enough, I bet you can fucking taste them. He's a kind
of short guy - maybe about 5' 7" - so all his musculature fits neatly on a
small frame and his legs have a real shape to them. Only the lightest,
wispy blonde hair on them too.
You've already unleashed your cock at this point as you browse, and are
stroking it determinedly.
You ease off, though, to find out more. Seek out some video.
In live action you see the difference more between this Justin Benchley and
the one you watched with Ramon and Sharkey. And yet strangely...
The scenes you discover are erotically uninspiring, labelled with things
like 'Ropers Reach - The Fire Episode' or 'The Robbery', 'Dale's Mom Gets
Abortion :-( ' , and so on, and young Justin appears too fleetingly in
almost all of his scenes. His voice is nice, a little deeper than you'd
expect, but with an occasional almost lispy softness on the consonants that
you get the feeling the actor Jared Shaden is consciously trying to
eliminate. They only slip through occasionally.
It's interesting sizing up his place in the show. The older the clips, the
more minor a character he is. He starts off the little-glimpsed younger
brother of one of the leading female characters, and his role builds
gradually - the more so when his sister leaves the show to go to
college. But even in the chunks you find from season six - which you gather
from the more intelligible of the user comments was his last as a regular
cast member - he still doesn't quite make it into the core set of
characters.
The central protagonists are mainly members of the Roper family,
descendants of the small town's founder Jake Roper. There's towering bad
boy basketball star Hutton, his more 'academic' brother Bailey
(translation: he wears spectacles sometimes), and their tomboy tearaway
sister Jay, which is presumably short for something, but who cares
really. There's also Hutton's girlfriend Phoenix, who by season five
replaces the previous one, Laurel Benchley, the actress having gone on to
star in a movie franchise based on a kids' toy range.
Judging from the comments left on site, this Laurel girl was more popular
with the fans, who feel the show has lost it since she left. Quite what
'it' was, you can't imagine, judging from the content on here.
Justin Benchley, meanwhile, is Laurel's brother, and though he's always
depicted as a sweet and reliable young man, a sort of mascot for the show,
he rarely gets any particularly meaty storylines. He is truly the boy next
door, ever-present but tangential to the action.
More frequently than actual scenes from the show, you come across montages
of clips and those already familiar publicity pictures of Justin/Jared,
compiled by his adoring teen fans and accompanied by twee sentimental pop
songs with mighty key changes.
There is something to interest you here, though. It's just not among the
first batch of hits. A few pages back, there are scattered scenes of Justin
Benchley getting involved in something dark and furtive. It's not clear
exactly what from what you see, but you can tell from the musical cues and
rainy night-time scenes that something's up. Justin leaves his fiancee's
house - not long graduated, they're high school sweethearts - and his
aspect darkens. Looking reluctant but determined, he heads down a dark
alley off the main street and waits in a disused car lot. A Mercedes pulls
up and he gets in, talking to some shadowy guy who we can't see behind the
assault of raindrops on the windscreen. From the doomy chords, you'd think
we were watching a scene of murder, but as the screen fades to darkness,
you're left none the wiser about what's been happening. Drug dealing maybe?
As you hunt further, following a link to some fan sites, you discover that
Justin Benchley's storyline in season six was, and still is, considered
vague and muddled by the show's viewers. This is perhaps why it's among the
least popular of the videos you found, and the least represented part of
his role in the show.
Following a couple of links, you discover that the show's writers and
producers had plans for a 'hard-hitting' storyline that would give the show
a darker edge and maybe shake it out of its ratings slump. The idea was
that an overworked Justin Benchley, desperately saving all his money to
meet the unexpectedly vast costs of a wedding for himself and his fiancee,
would be reluctantly persuaded into providing sexual favours for a guy, a
rich software developer living in a huge mansion just outside the town.
This seems to have been intended, nominally, as some kind of comment on the
recession, but also, hush now, as a bit of titillation for a sector of the
audience largely ignored in the actual content of the show. Oh sure, Jay
came out as a lesbian in season 2, to provide some implied girl-on-girl
action to help keep the straight guys interested. But male homosexuality,
even the suggestion of it, remained taboo.
And still does. Because as it turns out, the planned storyline never came
to fruition. Credible accounts of it on the web say the show's creators
underestimated how difficult it would be to tackle the subject
'tastefully', resulting in botched and confusing scenes like the few you've
found. Some behind-the-scenes debate over the wisdom of pursuing such a
plotline mean the will didn't really exist to follow it through, and for a
number of weeks in the middle of that season, it simply disappeared,
eclipsed by bigger storylines, like the shock revelation of who had
fathered Asher's baby. It's rumored that by the end the writers were
frantically hunting for an alternate explanation of Justin's strange
behavior in the earlier part of the season, and very likely the idea that
the young man was was prostituting himself for cash would have been
replaced with something far tamer.
Much of these behind the scenes revelations come as news to Justin's keen
fans on the messageboards. A typical remark says: 'Ewwwwww that wud have
been SO GROSE. so glad they changed thier mindz Jeared RULES'
A smattering of other posts say the opposite: 'Whoo man, Could have been so
hot. He can suck MY d*ck anyday lol'
In the end, what happened was that season six finished abruptly and early
because of the writers' strike, and when Ropers Reach finally did return
with a fresh batch of storylines and a couple of new hottie characters,
Justin Benchley was no longer there. His fans have pretty much decided, for
closure, that in the interim he and his fiancee got married and moved
away. Some declare their disappointment that he never properly left the
show, but agree that one of the new guys, Vance Hoeger, is beyond hot. And
so the discussion moves on.
You go on to find a few more images of Justin, not much more video
material. It's all kind of a letdown considering what had been
planned. Even just a fleeting suggestion of guy-on-guy involving the sexy
Justin would have been enough.
And it still doesn't really explain how this guy - or sort of not-quite
this guy - appeared in the movie you saw at Sharkey's.
You're about to give up and kick back, jerk off just to get it out of your
system. Then you remember that in your bag you have that plug-in device
from Sharkey. The BlueShark Video Dorsal adaptor. He promised an unrivalled
search engine facility that would find you exactly what you're looking for.
You fish around in your bag and take it out, a small object similiar to a
memory stick, but quite a bit heavier, and with an illuminated BlueShark
insignia. You hold it in your hand for a moment, mulling over whether to
install it.
Find exactly what you're looking for.
Fuck it, you insert it into your laptop. It slots in with a thunk.
After a tense, shuddering screen-freeze pause, it springs into action, a
thick bar snaking satisfyingly across the screen as it installs. The
graphics appear blocky and low-tech, but it all works so quickly, you
wonder if that isn't just a design choice. The adaptor itself hums deeply,
its blue light throbbing meditatively. It promises something
beneficial. You're definitely going to get something out of this.
You click a series of yeses, and before you know it, you've reached a
screen congratulating you on entering the BlueShark domain. Minimizing that
window, you find a BlueShark icon has appeared on your desktop, just
waiting to be clicked on.
Sucking on your lower lip, you do so.
There's a heart-stopping moment of nothingness - what the fuck's this going
to do - and then a homepage appears for Dorsal, BlueShark's dedicated
search application. It's in darker, richer colors than an average webpage,
but offers the typical array of options.
You do an image search. 'Justin Benchley'.
A treasure trove appears. A bunch of images that appear to be from the same
poolside photoshoot that you found earlier on the mainstream search
engine. But now its darker, later in the day, and now Justin, this sexy
young guy, is wearing so much less. He sits coyly, eyes to camera, hugging
his knees, in tiny, shiny black briefs that could be silk, or could be
leather, or could be rubber. And in the next picture over, the curve of his
buttocks shimmers and glistens in them as he poses on all fours. Lust in
his eyes and in the set of his mouth.
Next in the sequence, his ass thrusting up as his face rests against rough
concrete. And then a series of pictures where he's changed into an even
smaller pair of underpants - what amounts to a tiny, torn thong. He poses
unabashedly, showing off his beautiful boy next door body as he flexes, and
squats, and crawls with his tender young back arched like a cats. Oh fuck,
he is beautiful and so in his prime. His body is athletic and strong, it is
definite, and yet it's also boyish, and the skin is creamy and supple, so
minimally hairy, just wisps of blonde on his shins and calves and
forearms. Oh yeah, and those shoulders and the robust backs of his
arms. How any man could resist such a temptation is as much a mystery to
you as it is to me. You feel a deep, bestial longing to bury yourself
inside him, a desire that is strong and unquestionable and right, and comes
from as deep inside you as the roots of a tree come from the earth. This
boy must surrender himself to a man's lust. He must. It's that simple. You
let out a low moan. You feel like you could cum into him forever.
---------------------------------------------------------
Dorsal's video search application comes up with a selection of small screen
shots. You browse through them aimlessly for a while.
A legend appears on the screen: 'Roper's Reach: Season 6 - Full Deleted and
Extended Scenes Package'
You click on it, and are advised that following this option will cost you
30% of your purple credit bar. The bar appears, enlarged, at the bottom of
the screen for emphasis. Click here to see more of Justin Benchley. All the
secret scenes.
You look at the captured images again. It's like all your desires for this
boy have been knotted together and trapped in little glass slides. You
desperately need for this trapped desire to be unleashed, allowed to
flourish. You can't just abandon Justin's story where you last saw it. It's
like an itch you can never scratch.
Still, that's another good chunk of your credits. And this soon after
giving up so many of them on the Decker's Destiny movie. That'll take you
up to almost two thirds gone already. Money can't buy this stuff. You
wonder if what's left will be enough for later.
Cursing Sharkey's clever sales pitch, it's an hour before you return to the
laptop, which you haven't actually closed or turned off, and return to the
bookmarked page. Yes, dammit, yes I agree. Can't have your cake and eat it,
I guess. With an electronic gulp, the purple bar shrinks by nearly a third
and is replaced by a page stacked with various scenes and a 'Play All as
Movie' option.
Click.
------------
The opening montage in this version of the feature begins with a series of
dissonant electronic chords, nothing like the usual twee mock indie-rock
style of Ropers Reach, and sees the man Shackley awakening beneath crisp
black sheets in large bedroom of modernist chrome and glass. The sky
outside is a rich and hot blue, but the room appears cold, lacking in human
warmth.
Ben Shackley himself appears this way, too, as he rises naked from the
bed. Like the place where he sleeps, he has a hard sort of beauty that is
also devoid of human wamth. A fit-bodied forty-year-old, he is tall and
leanly muscular, but in an unpleasing predatory-looking way, like he might
suddenly and violently pounce. His body is patterned with dark hair and
occasional, expansive black tattoos. His features are chiselled and
intense, with a hooded kind of brow. A cruel face that can disguise itself
as handsome. Like anyone past thirty in this show, he looks like a former
model or athlete who's only a whisker past his prime. As he sits at the
edge of the bed, he rubs the weight of sleepiness away from his face.
Cut to an altogether different bedroom. Golden, honeyed sunlight pours in
through thin, faded flowery curtains, into a room cluttered with mess and
bric-a-brac, There are crumpled jeans and ditched oversized boxer shorts on
the floor, and shelves with pop CDs, old hockey trophies, and framed
photographs of a pretty girl. An old poster of cult cartoon character Lunar
Surf Guy. A skateboard with a layer of dust, wedged between an oak chest of
drawers and the wall. There's a cozy single bed with a head of light brown
curling hair nestled tightly in amongst thick pillows, and one smallish
bare foot dangling out from the bottom. At a call from an older female
voice from elsewhere in the house, Justin Benchley sits up and rubs his
eyes, wipes the mussed fringe away from his face. He wears a faded orange
T-shirt, with some ironic advertising slogan, over a soft, still boyish
sort of body. But when he reaches forward to rub his eyes, you notice the
pleasing roundness of his shoulders and the hard arc of his biceps. Been
working out a lot lately, you might think. Actually, he had a short-term
job on a construction site.
His face is broad, and in some indefinable way, appears honest and
good. Perhaps it's his big eyes, coloured somewhere halfway between green
and brown. Or it may be the angelic, choirboy aura bestowed by his rampant
mop of hair. People who knew him would call his face handsome, but only
because they're resisting describing what it really is: pretty.
He rises and stretches, an ebbing early morning boner tenting his boxers
before wilting away. He pats an old brown dog that sleeps in a basket at
the foot of his bed, and has done for years. The dog grumbles
appreciatively before going back to sleep.
Back to the austere Sharkey. Oh, did I say Sharkey. I meant of, course,
Shackley. We see now that there is something at the end of his bed
too. There is a cage there made of up of black bars, and inside its cramped
confines there sleeps the crumpled up body of what in any other
circumstances would appear a black-haired, olive-skinned adonis. A shiny
black ball gag fills this young man's square-jawed mouth, and one arm is
chained to the bars at the wrist. As Shackley yawns and stretches, he
steps over and stands appreciatively in front of the cage, which barely
reaches past the level of his knees. His own cock stands rigid and proud as
he looks down at his captive hunk. This always gives him a much-needed
boost at the start of the day.
This unfortunate young dude is called Jansen, and you've pretty much seen
selected chunks of his story already, because you recognise right away that
this is a version of Jordon Lunar living out his life of sexual slavery in
a somehow parodic version of Sharkey's huge house. Physically, this guy's
vibe is different, but from what we see here, the story is the same...
And yet what is the story, really? We can assume the luscious surfer guy
has perhaps angered Shackley in some way, or has committed the far more
dangerous, inadvertent crime of inflaming the cockney bastard's
lust. Whatever, he's being punished for it, and Shackley is satisfied. Do
you really know anything more about what the other, the real Jordon Lunar
did? What his crime against Sharkey was?
Unlike Sam, Justin's loyal old Airedale terrier, Jansen has not belonged to
Shackley for very long, and won't stay with him for long either. That's not
our concern here, though, so we'll leave him to his fate, stroll away as
casually as Shackley himself.
Justin Benchley showers in a tiny bathroom, erotically ghostly behind
frosted and steamed glass.
Shackley does likewise, in a much larger shower cubicle.
Justin wanders back into his bedroom, a homely towel wrapped around his
waist. His dripping hair is plastered tight to his head. He opens a
stubborn top drawer and takes out some tube socks and big boxers. Dropping
the towel around his legs so that it lands in a crumpled O-shape on the
floor, we see a shot of his legs, stopping just short of his upper
thighs. His legs still glimmer with water, the few fine hairs
invisible. Seeing them in isolation, you notice they have a curiously
vulnerable sort of beauty. They're very slender at the point where they
taper into his ankles. His feet shuffle about as he steps into his
oversized boxers and pulls them up.
In a black and silver bathroom, Shackley stands shaving methodically in his
black trunk underwear. His legs, which we see from behind, are longer and
stronger, with more defined musculature. They are impressive, somehow,
instead of vulnerable - mighty struts that plant him firmly on the ground.
Shackley runs a hand over his closely shaved hair.
----------------------------------------------
Twinkling lights and copious tinsel adorn the living room of the Benchley
home. Still in his towel, Justin has a pleasant, nutritious breakfast,
resists stealing one of the cooling Christmas cookies his mom has left out
on a baking tray beside the window. Then he goes back to his room, gets all
dressed up in the dumb-ass uniform he has to wear for his job in the
diner. He always hates putting on the silly bow tie, doesn't like the way
girls always say it's 'cute' like they're patting him on the head, like
he's a little kid.
His mom offers him a lift, but he chooses to walk to work. He throws on a
mismatched woolly hat, scarf and gloves - but because this is a glossy TV
show, even the 'mismatched' items have a designed looked to them, like
they've been mismatched carefully. Then he sets off in the thick, crunchy
snow. He says hi to the grouchy neighbour digging the snow from his drive,
offers to help. Mr Gorse looks at his watch, tells Justin not to make
himself late for work on account of him.
Justin walks with a spring in his step but deep in thought. Lightly
weighing down his pocket is the engagement ring he's bought for his
girlfriend, Beth. He's been thinking about proposing on Christmas Eve for a
while now, and all of a sudden the day itself has come around. He only
actually went out and bought the ring yesterday, on the 23rd, and he's
trying not to worry about how he's even going to pay for it.
He's not too distracted by it by the time he settles into work at the
diner, though. The place is always too busy for that, and it's particularly
hectic on Christmas Eve. Everyone in town seems to turn out wanting to
sample the traditional specials Mrs Arthur always puts on for the festive
season. Her cranberry turkey log served with a bottomless cup of eggnog and
thickly iced mince pie for dessert is a dense, cramp-inducing combination
that no-one would even nudge a fork at at any other time of year, but man
do they go for it today. Wolf it down before it congeals, Justin thinks as
he serves up his twentieth of the morning.
Around lunchtime, a group of his old school friends turn up for
breakfast. Their amusement, apparently just at the simple idea of him
having a job, let alone having to serve them or do it in a stupid uniform,
is irritating even when it's good-natured. From the girls, there's the
dreaded discussion of how cute he looks in his neat-o outfit. This always
provokes some kind of vague hostility in the guys, like they're jealous -
but of what, Justin can't imagine. Just the attention, he
supposes. Fortunately, being so busy means he really can't spend too long
talking to them. It isn't too long before he's handing them their check and
they leave, looking bloated and festive. No sign of Beth today.
Goddamn Marian calls in sick and Justin is persuaded to work a double
shift. No way she's really ill; he's been expecting this Christmas Eve call
all week. At least it means he can earn a little extra money, he thinks
ruefully, and it won't affect him meeting Beth tonight. Now that it's well
into the afternoon, and it's already getting dark - a darkness lit up by a
galaxy of excitable colorful lights draping the town's streets - he's
getting an excited, apprehensive feeling in his stomach about the
proposal. He hasn't been expecting that.
When it gets to early evening, close to the end of his shift, the place
really starts to clear out. Everyone's elsewhere doing Christmas things, he
guesses. Families tucked comortably into their homes, or giving parties -
younger folk out in bars. The diner's now down to its usual core of
customers, and in fact a few less of them than usual.
His old high school English teacher is there. Ms Ides. Spectacles balanced
on her nose, she's reading a battered old paperback, looks like something
bought from a railway station in 1933, and sipping a black coffee. With a
slight sense of pity, he wonders what her Christmas plans are. He knows
she's divorced, that's for sure - it became kind of a running joke in her
classes, all the disparaging references she's make to her ex-husband. She
played up really well to her character, that of the bitter, middle-aged ex
wife. She always seemed funny and in control in her classroom. Here in the
diner, she looks a little lost. Still, she keeps a very dignified poise.
With no-one around, he decides to wander over in the midst of his
scrubbing-up duties to talk to her. He realises he's busting to talk to
someone about his plans for tonight, that it won't quite feel real until
he's said it out loud, and he wants it to feel real before the moment he's
gone too far ...
Well, not too far. Until he's asked. Until the question is out there. Oh,
anyway ...
"More coffee, Ms Ides?" he asks perkily, with a sense of overplaying his
own role.
"Yeah, sure Justin, why not," she nods. "How'd you like the face?"
He's bewildered by the question, until she puts town her book, takes her
thickly-rimmed spectacles off and points her face up at him, blinking with
what appears to be some strain.
"Botox," she says. "Kind of a Christmas present to myself."
Of course, every performer over the age of about 35 in this show is botoxed
to some extent, so for the 48-year-old Ms Ides the effect has to be
accentuated with makeup. She still has that careworn, slightly depressive
kind of look, but its minimized. It's sort of like she's been airbrushed a
litle, reduced to a bare minimum. Her wryness is given a fresher face.
She chuckles dryly. "Please don't answer, Mr Benchley. I know everyone over
the age of 25 looks like a freakshow to a stripling of your age."
Ms Ides has a sometime tendency to casually use words that you only see in
old books - an occupational hazard for a teacher of English. "So, is this
how a young man about town spends his Christmas Eve? Waiting on old broads
with poison in their faces?"
Accepting the invitation to conversation, it's not long before Justin's
taking a seat opposite her, eyes warily on the kitchen. He tells her that
he's finishing soon, whispers that tonight's the night he plans to propose
to his girlfriend.
He realises that he's kind of asking her advice. Quite why, he doesn't
know. Perhaps he's always taken her world-weary cyncism for wisdom. She's
always given the impression that she quite enjoys being a ghost in the
wreck of her own life. Maybe she's a wraith with a warning.
"Do you think -" he stutters eventually, once he's spent enough time in
preamble, "Do you think this is the right time for it? Do you think we're
ready?"
She laughs. "Oh, Justin. You always were so charmingly earnest. You do
realise I'm hardly the person to ask if you're wanting someone to extol the
virtues of marriage?"
She goes on to tell him that she married her villainous ex - may he rot in
South Carolina - at an early age and spent fifteen years regretting the
haste of her decision. Then again, she reasons, he was a jerk -
- in fact she says 'asshole' but this would never go out in the show's
timeslot -
- and Justin Benchley isn't, so things might go a lot better for Beth and
himself. Ultimately, she advises him to go for it. And not become an
asshole. Jerk. Whatever.
To his slight embarrassment, she ruffles his hair as he goes on his
way. "Always such a good kid," she muses wistfully.
--------------------
Justin takes Beth to the local park, which has of course been transformed
into a sparkling winter wonderland bathed in blue moonlight. The proposal
to his sweetheart goes smoothly and romantically. It's a big, soaring night
for him. He feels like he's really become a man. Seen as part of the
episode as a whole, the proposal is just one part of a dramatic Christmas
montage; the sweet, uplifting part in contrast to the car crash, Kendra's
discovery that her boyfriend is cheating, and Jace's mom sliding back into
alcoholism beneath the Christmas tree. Justin's story is just one part of
the festive mosaic, but it's the buoyant, uplifting part.
We fade out on a kiss between Justin and Beth that looks like it could go
on forever.
----------
There's a snake in the grass.
Isn't there always? It's a fucking TV show, something's bound to go wrong
the next week, even if it is liable to be put right and all wrapped up in
another fifty minutes.
This snake arrives in the form of a femme fatale. A bad old good-time girl
out to ensnare our wholesome Justin with her liberated sexuality and
leftfield dress sense.
You know you're in trouble when it's an L name. When it's a Lana or a Lola
or a Laila. When it's a Lolly, ready to pop. Actually, you've never heard
of a Laila until now, but that's what this one is. A dark-haired girl, new
in town, who starts hanging around the diner and sets her catlike green
eyes on Justin.
Justin notices the attention pretty quickly. For all he acts the naive kid,
he's no fool, and he kind of knows when someone's got the hots for
him. Secretly, really deep down secretly with a vanity no-one knows about,
he isn't surprised to get the attention. For every girl that treats him
like a cute, harmless brother there's been another one who wants to jump
his bones and ruffle his sexy hair. Laila acts cool and flirts tersely like
an ice queen, trying to rattle him by being aloof. But he's got the
ultimate trump card: So what, I'm enaged to the love of my life. So she
can't rile him. Nice try, sweetheart, he thinks, smirking, as he passes by
her while she poses at the counter and he goes back and forth to the
tables.
That's what he thinks. For a week or two, that's what he thinks. But man,
every week, every episode, the titles roll and there she is, propping up
the counter at the diner with her raspberry tart and her black coffee
(because, as is in so many 'aspirational' shows, her seeming diet bears no
relation to her physical shape - the actress probably spits the cake out
between takes), and Justin's will to resist her charms is worn down by
sheer physical presence. Not that he's about to leap into bed with her or
anything, he's a good guy, but he starts to notice how attractive she is in
a more than objective away. He starts to to devote some thought to the
matter. Finds himself sneaking into the staff bathroom, the tiny cubicle,
to think of her and beat himself off. Starts rolling her name, Laila
Bayliss, around on his tongue. Finding 'Bayliss' compressing itself into
'Bliss'. Dumb stuff like that.
It doesn't help anything that the whole engagement thing soon starts
becoming oppressively real, and a big drain on finances which, if he's
honest, barely exist. You can't put a deposit down on a mortgage with tips
from a diner. Payments for the ring soon become more crippling for his
spare cash than he'd first anticipated; he realises now that in his first
flush of romantic giddiness, he'd wilfully overlooked the consequences of
splashing out, blithely ignored the inevitable debts he'd find himself
saddled with. It's not that he doesn't love Beth, but now when he thinks of
her it is tinged, just a little, with associated thoughts of debt and
responsibilities.
Jesus, couldn't Ms Ides have warned him about that? It only took a little
forward thinking!
He settles into an easy banter with Laila, who always makes a point of
taking her earphones out to speak to him. The music she listens to is
electronic - unearthly and weird, like the sounds of a diseased video
game. He only catches snippets of it in the moments between her popping the
earphones out and pausing her mp3 player. He asks her once if he can have a
listen - wondering if there really is some frisson of unspoken intimacy in
the act of nestling those same little buds in their ears, or if he's just
imagining it - and gives up, puzzled, after no more than thirty
seconds. "That's kind of out there," he shrugs. Justin prefers what you
could call department store hip hop. He's not much of a music guy, he
guesses. She just smiles in an infuriatingly - arousingly? - smug 'yeah,
that's what I figured you'd do' manner. In a brief but intense flash of
anger, he wonders where this stuck-up bitch gets the idea she knows so much
about him, like he's nothing more than some stock character in a TV
show. But then he realises that he's thinking 'yeah, that's what I figured
YOU'D do when I didn't like your electro-doohicky shit'. So, he decides,
the score is even.
Laila develops a habit of filming him on her phone, in the course of his
duties at work. She does it quite openly, telling him in deadpan tones that
she's gonna stick him on ViewzTube or something as 'Sexy ass waiter' and
see how many hits she can get.
"Don't you fucking dare!" he chuckles, then blushes as Mrs Arthur pops her
head out of the kitchen to scold him for swearing.
The redness in his cheeks comes less from him being a lamewad than from the
creeping intimation that his boss, and all these other people in the diner
- are witnessing what could well be the beginnings of something he will
later not want them to know about.
Yes, he's already considering, on some level, that he may have an affair
with Laila. The words 'sexy ass waiter' could just have been the carelessly
tossed-away joke they sounded like, but Justin Benchley is very easily won
over by the admiration of others. Secretly, he always has been.
And if this workaday flirtation really were to lead to something - well,
fuck, he's already in a situation where tongues might easily wag. Indeed,
there's already the distinct possibility that he's going to have to spend
one evening soon earnestly explaining to Beth that this Laila girl, who
everyone around town says he has such a good time with, is just a
friend. Not even a friend in fact - just a customer in the diner. And it's
part of his job to be nice to the customers, godammit!
Thus, in a rapid train of thought whose rapid snowballing he's almost
unaware of until it hits him, Justin Benchley finds himself squirming to
disguise an affair he's not having.
After that day, though, he starts making a conscious effort to be a little
less friendly towards Laila. When she gets her camera phone out and starts
pointing at him, he snaps "Yeah. Could you not do that please", and when
she starts to tease him about his cute modesty, he snaps that he's
serious. Laila only comes in a couple of times more and then starts hanging
out, he guesses, in cafes back on her campus. He feels a little sad about
it, hating to be unfriendly.
Then it's him and Beth again, making plans. The thought starts to occur to
him: What if I'd gone to college? It's something he's never thought about
before. He tries to avoid realising that he's just thinking about Laila at
one remove.
But, out of the blue, just before an act break, he receives a text:
hey there sexy ass waiter x sorry think i embarrased u at work. but we can
hang out a little in the real world cant we? call me dude xxx
Oh man. This flummoxes him. The message arrives while he's at work and in a
matter of minutes he drops and smashes a heaped plate of bolognese. Tidying
up the mess, his mind races. Like the engagement, this has suddenly got
real. To reply to this girl with a yes would be a definite step. It would
be an action, by him, that he could never tell Beth about. There's no
question about that. It would certainly have to be a secret... and so this
simple act of tapping some keys on his phone would already count as
cheating on his fiancee.
After tidying up the mess, Justin busies himself with his work. Immersing
himself in the midday rush, he almost panics when a mid-afternoon drought
of customers threatens to leave him alone with his thoughts.
He persuades himself that his dilemma lies not in choosing what he will do,
but working out how he can gave this girl the brush off politely and
without offending her. He's led a fairly sheltered life, Justin Benchley,
and for the rest of the day this is one of the most earth-shattering crises
he's ever had to face. Doing the right thing has always seemed so easy when
doing the wrong one hasn't been a viable option. He's in a real panic, and
close to the end of his shift, Mrs Arthur even notices it enough to ask him
what's wrong. He tells her he's got money worries - which is, after all,
true - and she quickly changes the subject, under the impression that he's
making clumsy overtures towards asking for a raise.
It's far from the most dramatic thing happening in Roper's Reach that day,
of course. There's the hostage crisis with the terrorist sect, Jace's act
of gung-ho bravery. But it feels pretty huge to the cute, peripheral
Justin.
------
How then, you might wonder, do we find him two episodes later hanging
around in a bar a little way outside town with Laila like he doesn't have a
care in the world? Why is he wearing his best black silk short-sleeved
shirt that he picked out specially for the evening he proposed to Beth? And
acting like he doesn't noticed how sluttily dressed Laila is? I mean,
stylishly, exotically slutty - like a Victorian governess who's gone off
the rails and become a 1980s punk, the kind of crazed style only a young
student could even attempt - but you couldn't miss the signals.
Well, it's because Justin ultimately did make his choice. And having made
the wrong one, it was only natural that he should instantly begin the
process of backtracking on all of his accumulated anxieties of earlier in
the day. The haste with which he shrugged off these previously
life-or-death worries, the sense of his fate hanging the balance, was
rather astounding. In the event, he felt no real guilt about replying to
Laila letting her know he'd be happy to meet up with her. And soon,
spending a couple of nights a week hanging out with her without telling his
girlfriend - his fiancee, he means his fiancee - became just another thing
he did, like getting up and going to work. It wasn't a deception, after
all, he wasn't lying to anyone. They weren't having sex, they really
weren't, so what's the difference?
All he is doing, he reasons, is forestalling smalltown gossip and avoiding
having Beth make a big deal about nothing. He even starts to nurse a kind
of pitying contempt for his neighbours and lover. So smallminded.
He has fun with Laila. They laugh together. Unfortunately, they don't have
a huge amount in common. They can talk about movies and TV shows for a
while, Laila can diss her exes while Justin, not sure whether he's proud or
embarrassed, tells her Beth's always been his one and only. But he can't
share any of the local gossip with her - that's right, the smalltown gossip
he's also decided to disdain - because she's not from round here and
wouldn't know any of the people he's talking about, any of the familiar old
stories and urban legends. And so, though he'd rather not, he starts
whining to her about the money worries that are consuming him. The drink
loosens his tongue, and soon he feels like he can't shut up about it. This
happens a couple of times on their nights out until he makes a conscious
effort to not do it any more.
Then there are awkward, dangerous silences. During one of these, he asks
her again how she actually got his number, if it was from one of his
friends.
She gives her stock response, tapping her nose and telling him with a smile
that she never reveals her sources.
Something has to happen next with this dangling narrative thread. Sure
enough, there comes a point where Beth has to go away for a long weekend to
visit relatives in Portland. At the same time, Laila invites Justin to go
out with her to the clubs in the next town over, the bigger more
sophisticated town where all the students go for a big night out.
Now, you know this is trouble. In the simplistic moral geography of Ropers
Reach, neighbouring DeMontley is quietly posited as a licentious cesspit of
affluence and vice. It's rumored the Mayor has a lover there, and every
character in the show with any connection to the place always has a dark
secret and ultimately comes to a sticky end. This is also one of those
wholesome smalltown shows where 'clubbing' is treated like a gateway drug,
with the implication that orgies and black masses can't be far away. Any
character who suggests it is certainly up to no good.
Of course, Justin doesn't delve into the subtext. He persuades himself that
he'd have happily invited Beth along - oh, by the way, this is my pal Laila
- had she not been some several hundred miles away, and goes shopping for
some cool new threads that he can't really afford at the moment. The next
town over seems a safe distance - not that he has anything to hide.
A montage of Justin Benchley and Laila Bayliss dancing the night away in a
DeMontley club. Justin is cutting loose on the dancefloor and it feels
great; he hadn't even realised how much he needed some release, how
stressed and trapped he's been starting to feel in his everyday life.
As the pair leave the place in the early hours, totally drunk and high and
full of endorphins, he feels blissful and on top of the world. He feels
like anything's possible.
Laila tells him there's no need to get a cab all the way back to Ropers
Reach at this hour, that she has a friend in DeMontley and they can crash
at his place. Justin shrugs, dopily delighted at the ease of it all, and
agrees.
The ruse is ingenious, neatly credible. In her intoxicated state, Laila
'forgets' to call her DeMontley friend before they go knocking on his
apartment door. The 'friend', Ben Shackley, comes to the door in his
underwear, spectacles wonky as he's apparently just put them on to find his
way to the door, 'groggy' and 'confused'. He acts angry at this
middle-of-the-night disruption, but when Laila gets apologetic and explains
that she just didn't think, offering to just go get a cab and head back to
Ropers Reach after all, he eases off with the grouching and invites them
in.
Justin finds himself shyly looking at the older guy's body as he walks
around in his underwear, with no apparent thought of dressing for them. He
realises how naive and smalltown he is, as he realises he's feeling a sharp
sense of surprise at seeing a guy who must be about fifteen years older
than him looking so - well, so ripped and fit. Especially since Laila had
described this guy as a software developer - he'd kind of expected some fat
geek. Now he wonders if this isn't a friend of Laila's, but some ex
lover. Again he curses himself a sheltered hick for finding this
so... well, so grown up. So sophisticated!
While this Ben Shackley guy shucks off his initial crustiness to act warm
and welcoming to Laila, Justin senses a coldness towards him. Still, he
offers them a drink, and when they say that they couldn't swallow another
drop after the night they've had, he offers them some pot instead. Laila
insists: "Oh man, sexy ass waiter guy, you have got to try some of this!
Ben's stuff is the best"
Justin resists briefly, but is feeling so relaxed and open that he
eventually gives in. Jesus, save us from this being the drugs "issue"
episode...
They all sit around smoking, Ben still in his underwear, Justin trying not
to stare at this unaccustomed sight, and wondering in the back of his mind
if he can get a body like that as he grows older. Irritatingly, Laila
becomes more and more insistent on being apologetic about the way they've
burst in on Ben in the middle of the night. Justin winces, thinks this is a
mistake as the guy seems to have forgotten about the intrusion and it's now
only Laila who's making an issue of it.
Nonetheless, she goes on.
"Hey, Justin," she finally says. At the agreed upon time, and when they've
had just enough weed. Notice also how Shackley doesn't smoke quite as much
of it as he appears to be doing, and how a woozy Justin doesn't spot this.
"Justin, you should give Ben a kiss. Did you know Ben likes guys? You
should give him a kiss just to say thanks. I'm sure he'd appreciate it,
right, Ben?"
Ben looks away, acting bashful. "Shut up, Laila. He doesn't have to do
anything like that."
Justin, discomfited, looks betwen them.
"Ooooooh, you see, Justin? I know that look. Ben's just being shy - he'd
love you to give him a kiss really. I think he likes you. Come on, don't be
a wuss - it's the least you can do!"
"Take no notice, pal" Ben says, scratching his closely shaved skull.
"Hey man, it's cool," Justin volunteers, surprising himself. "It's really
good of you to let us stay here -" he giggles - "and this weed is fucking
awesome, I gotta say ... here..."
He gets up, staggers over, leans in to kiss the guy on the mouth.
His lips have barely left Ben's when Laila pipes up again. "Come on, sexy
ass waiter, a proper kiss, not a little peck!"
What the hell, thinks the lightheaded Justin, and opens his mouth, goes for
it.
Whoah! He pulls away. It feels good. It feels more good than he wants it
to. He feels kind of daring. But that's enough.
That's enough, except that what feels like an hour later he's started
making out with Laila. And she's pulled his shirt off over his head, and
taken off her own, though she is still wearing her bra. That's enough,
except that her friend Ben has joined them on the couch, and Justin feels
the man's hands fondling his body, and doesn't resist. Doesn't resist the
extra pair of hands stroking at his cock through the folds of the oversized
cutesy boxers that Justin now kind of regrets wearing routinely. The extra
pair of fondling, groping hands pawing at his shoulders and his waist and
his nipples are like some heaven-sent sensual bonus, like he's discovered
sex: version 2. Shackley's attentions seem to enable intercourse between
himself and Laila, and in his callow, heedless way, Justin accepts it like
it's the attention of a eunuch or something, this fag guy grabbing what he
can, scraps from the feast, as the straight boy and girl get down to it.
When Shackley starts kissing him, all interspersed with kisses from Laila,
he sinks into it greedily, mindlessly. Oh man, it does feel good, it feels
great. He feels fucking dirty as fuck doing this, kissing this guy and
kissing this girl. Fuck, this is something he can keep inside him
forever. Cute kid Justin Benchley being bad. Man, he's cheating on his
fiancee in a stranger's apartment in DeMontley, and just for the hell of
it, the stranger's joining in too. This is nothing like anything Justin
Benchley would ever do. It feels great.
The hands of Shackley and Laila find their way to his cock when his
underwear is stripped away and dropped to the floor. They stroke him until
he feels more erect than he's ever been before. Then, as he fucks Laila at
last, oh Christ yes, he acknowledges now he's been aching for this, Ben
massages his shoulders and back encouragingly, like he's the champ.
So Justin gasps when, as he ruts with Laila, he feels the first prod of
Ben's cock head between his buttocks. But she wraps her hands around his
head and whispers sexily, "Take it, Justin... just take it... you'll like
it, I swear..." Panting, nervous, Justin is too caught up in the amazing,
burning heat of this fuck to not go with the flow. He doesn't want to
resist. If he's gonna be dirty, why not go all the way. It's nothing he's
ever going to tell anyone about. He feels Shackley's strong hands grab hard
at his waist and then...
Oh.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmann. Fuck.
Fuck it hurts. He calls out, he cries, and Laila catches the exclamation in
her mouth, scoops it up with another deep kiss. She holds tight onto the
hair at the sides of his head, like she's cradling him through the
pain. Until it...
"Aw. Uh fuck. Fuckyeah..." Justin wheezes suddenly. Until it turns to
pleasure. He doesn't even know if pleasure is the word for it, but he's
stunned as he feels himself filling up from behind, there's something
inside of him that expands the swelling, approaching orgasm in him way
beyond where he thought it could possibly go, like a bubble that just keeps
getting bigger when it seems it should have already burst. He's driven to
fuck harder by it, and he's so full of this scorching, exalted heat that
he's barely aware of his limbs anymore.
Oh my fucking God, I'm being fucked, he thinks. A man is fucking me while I
fuck my girl. He laughs hysterically, and then moans in pleasure.
"That's it, sexy ass waiter..." Laila teases, grabbing and stroking roughly
at his hair. "Ohhhfuck yeah, you're so cute getting fucked..."
He buries his face in her pert round tits and submits more and more to the
pounding his ass is getting, pushing back against the cock to take it even
deeper inside - he thought it was deep before, now he realises it had
barely entered him at all - and, gorging on those tits, feeling himself
ploughed by some guy who can't fucking resist him -
- oh yeah, irresistible Justin Benchley, that's me -
- that's when he cums. And he cums and he cums as the cock way the fuck up
inside him seems to force more and more jizz out of him like it's pushing
the button on the fucking jizz dispenser.
"Oh man... oh manyeah... ohsweet fuckinJeSUS that's hot..." he gasps,
delighted in a way he's never know before, collapsing against Laila and
kissing her breasts as the man's dick continues to pound at his insides.
"Alright, motherfucker, my turn to cum now," Shackley says bluntly. Justin
is barely aware, he tells himself, of how Laila shifts out from underneath
him. How Shackley manouevres him round, and Laila helps him, until Justin
is on his back on the couch, and Laila, stood behind it, holds his legs
wide apart by the ankles, leaving him totally wide open to Shackley's big
cock, which he can see now in all its magnificence. Fuck, that is a man's
cock.
Fuck. Fuck, he's gone so far. He can't believe he's in so deep. Now he can
see Shackley, it's suddenly so real. This muscular man body, slick with
sweat. The curves and ridges of the raw monster cock that has already
invaded him and is ready for more. Shackley's face, the harmless face of
Laila's inconvenienced friend now transformed into a mask of savage,
unquenchable lust. Now Shackley's intensity scares him. Yet he's still
aroused. Now, now he's wide open to accept this man's massive cock. As
Laila grips his ankles and he doesn't resist, he's offering his wide open
asshole like he's some faggot slut.
And he doesn't want it to stop.
"Ohyeah" he mutters softly as Shackley leans in and over him. As the man
enters his butthole again and now he is fucked as he looks into his hooded
eyes. Looks into the eyes of the man who's fucking him.
Later, Justin will swear blind even to himself that what he says next is
not "Oh yeah, oh fuck me. Oh fuck me man, it feels fucking great". He'll
deny how enthusiastically he wraps his arms around Shackley's broad back
and holds on as the big man lifts him off the sofa and holds his legs up
off the floor and cocks him like a cheap bitch. How neighbor-waking loudly
he cries out "Oh FUCK ME, man! FUCKMEEE!" when Shackley slams him roughly
against the wall for his final drive before Justin feels a huge, hot man's
load of jizz squirt up inside him then cascade out from his sticky,
cock-plugged hole.
He'll deny it all, but we've seen, and Shackley has seen, and Laila has
seen.
He and Laila exhaustedly go to sleep in the spare bedroom, facing away from
each other. He barely knows what's happened, fingering gently at his
plundered, puckered wet butthole as he sinks into a deep slumber.
---------
When he awakes again, less than four hours later, his blood runs cold and
he gets the fuck out of the place as quickly and as quietly as he can. He
realises in the back of the cab back to Ropers Reach that he's never going
to call Laila again.
Back to Beth, back to his future. This never happened.
------
Of course, Justin has never really had Laila's phone number anyway. Because
'Laila' has never existed.
A talented, mischievous young woman in Shackley's employ, the woman has
fulfilled her task as the bait in the trap for the young man.
A little flashback:
Shackley sits at home, his real home, not the decoy DeMontley
apartment. He's at his laptop, composing the text message that sweet Justin
will receive from Laila.
He smiles darkly as he types:
hey there sexy ass waiter x sorry think i embarrased u at work. but we can
hang out a little in the real world cant we? call me dude xxx
Yes. He hits 'send'. Those words will appeal to the boy's vanity without
scaring him off. Combined with the slightly exotic lure of the girl (to a
smalltown jerk like Justin anyway), the dominoes are already set in
motion. All he has to do is wait. He cc's the girl in on the text to keep
her up to speed. Always keem to improv, she suggests she starts adopting
this as a teasing nickname for the man's tender young quarry. He likes this
idea. Says go ahead.
--------
And now Shackley has has his first taste of Justin Benchley/
/now Sharkey has had his first taste of Justin Benchley - the Ropers Reach
version of this story differs a little from the one we've previously seen -
and he's not going to let it go at that.
This gorgeous young man - oh this sweet boy, he craves him. Maybe he
doesn't know it yet, but Justin has the makings of a perfect, yielding
pussyboy, ripe to be taken in hand by a powerful, domineering man.
Oh yeah. This is not - must not be - the last time Sharkey hears Justin
Benchley beg to be fucked.